ACREE SURNAME DNA PROJECT

Progress Report for 2020

GROWTH

Our project gained six participants this year, raising our total tested membership to 102. All but one of the newcomers had earlier joined our Acree Group at Facebook, which has grown to nearly 950 members and continued to promote DNA testing, as well as family history discussion.

Four of our new participants, all of them Acrees, tested privately and inexpensively at the YSEQ firm for possession of the distinguishing Y-SNP called A2156, receiving positive results that confirmed them as descendants of William Acree (c1710-c1767) of Hanover Co., Virginia.

It's worth emphasizing that our Project has discovered distinguishing Y-SNPs not only for these "Virginia Acrees," but also for "Maryland Acrees" and for a New Jersey branch of the Akers family. This capability, derived primarily through "Big-Y" testing at FTDNA, is remarkable conceptually. Within every one of the trillions of cells in our bodies that contain our complete individual genome, we Acree/Akers males possess miniscule mutations that identify us as lineal descendants of particular Colonial-era forefathers. Genetic laboratories are infallibly capable of detecting our possession of these mutations. And our Project has succeeded in discerning which ones to seek. As more men take the revealing Big-Y test, enabling more precise comparisons, many of us may discover Y-SNPs that were born in our grandfathers, fathers and even ourselves.

The fifth newcomer, surnamed Williamson, matched the Y-STR haplotype of the Virginia Acrees but then tested additionally for possession of A2156. His negative result disproved our longstanding supposition that his Williamson branch, to which two other Williamson participants belong, descends from William Acree through an informal adoption in 1828 of a specific Acree boy in Tennessee. This is the first time that this test has been employed advantageously to prove a significant negative. (DNA testing is exceptional in its ability to contradict the adage that a negative can't be proven.) It's now evident that these three Williamsons share an ancestor with the Virginia Acrees who was born much earlier in England.

The sixth newcomer, though surnamed Acree, was obliged to test more expensively "the old-fashioned way" for Y-STRs because our Project lacks a Y-SNP pertaining to his ancestor, Jasper Newton Acree, who gained fame by publishing a Civil War memoir. Jasper acquired his surname from his widowed mother, whose Acree husband had died before his conception. Available haplotype comparisons indicate that his biological father was a man with the surname Lawson or Jenkins. Our project had earlier determined Jasper's ancestral haplotype from two matching descendants, which the newcomer has been found to share.

The table below summarizes how our participants, listed by surname in the rows, fit into identified genetic groups in the columns. (Those in the Singles column lack matches.) It shows in the final column, for instance, that 60 of us spell our name Acree, that a total of 21 have variants of the Acree name, and that another 21 have entirely different surnames. The latter have joined our project because their test results associate them with our genetic groups, indicating that they share unidentified ancestors who were born a couple centuries before our Acree/Akers progenitors.

DISCOVERY OF THE NORSE VIKING ORIGIN OF THE VIRGINIA ACREES

With the steady improvement of requisite technology, a fascinating field called "ancient DNA" has developed, which seeks to determine the genetic make-up of individuals who died long ago. It is relevant primarily to evolution and anthropology, but is becoming increasingly relevant to more recent human history. Of particular interest to our project, there have been two discoveries in Europe of old remains that contain the Y-SNP called S6915, a predecessor (born about 750 BC) of A2156 (born about 1650 AD) that is associated with the Virginia Acrees and their close non-Acree genetic matches. One of these two burials was mentioned in our 2018 progress report - that of a Germanic chieftain who died in Central Europe about 400 AD. Recently, it has been determined that a Norse Viking who died in Iceland about 1,000 years ago also possessed the S6915 mutation. It is far more revealing because it implies that the patrilineal ancestors of the Virginia Acrees were Scandinavians who migrated to the English-Scottish border area about that time by sea - sailing down the western coast of Scotland. While these scientific findings weren't an achievement of our project, the Big-Y testing of a fifth of our participants has helped to provide context.

INTEGRATION OF OUR ACREE DATA BASE WITHIN "THE FAMILY TREE"

For posterity, this Project's extensive data base of nearly 4,000 people having the Acree (or Acree-variant) surname was integrated within "The Family Tree," an effort by the Family Search organization (maintained by the LDS Church) to create a worldwide ancestral "wikitree," derived from widespread sources and individual family-history contributions, that is freely shared and contains over a billion deceased individuals who are being progressively inter-related. Most of you will likely find your grandfather and some of his ancestors within it. I've put all of my known ancestors in it. In May, I sent a message to Project participants telling them how to find their most recent ancestors there.

INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION OF OUR PROJECT

For eight years, our Project has been associated with our Acree Study at the Guild of One-Name Studies based in England. Recently, the Guild has been featuring selected studies on its homepage. In December it has been featuring ours.